Wonk with Mike Episode 21: Stats Cannabis, with James Tebrake

by Sarah Turnbull. Posted October 15, 2018

“Our issue was not so much how are we going to measure [cannabis] going forward but how do we measure the back period, the illegal period, so that when we provide a measure of GDP post-legalization we have a nice consistent time series.”

Host Mike Moffatt sat down James Tebrake, Director General of the Macroeconomics Accounts Branch at Statistics Canada. He and his team have been tasked with collecting data on cannabis consumption, output, and production before and after legalization on October 17 and understanding the affect this will have on the country’s GDP.